Towards an Approach for Evaluating the Quality of Requirements

Abstract

In engineering design, the needs of stakeholders are often captured and expressed in natural language (NL). While this facilitates such tasks as sharing information with non-specialists, there are several associated problems including ambiguity, incompleteness, understandability, and testability. Traditionally, these issues were managed through tedious procedures such as reading requirements documents and looking for errors, but new approaches are being developed to assist designers in collecting, analysing, and clarifying requirements. The quality of the end-product is strongly related to the clarity of requirements and, thus, requirements should be managed carefully. This paper proposes to combine diverse requirements quality measures found from literature. These metrics are coherently integrated in a single software tool. This paper also proposes a new metric for clustering requirements based on their similarity to increase the quality of requirement model. The proposed methodology is tested on a case study and results show that this tool provides designers with insight on the quality of individual requirements as well as with a holistic assessment of the entire set of requirements.

Automatic requirements extraction, analysis, and graph representation using an approach derived from computational linguistics

“…The description of the approach is done using a common example from the literature. This is done in Subsections 4.1‐4.7 using a small case study (see Table ).…”

“…The same case study was used in a previous work for validating the impact analysis of requirements documents . This case study is an example of a military air defense systems (case study MadeByGraph) . In this case study, different types of contradictions and types of requirements were added to the initial case study to study the validity of the approach developed.…”

“…Case study A : The first one comes from the MadeByGraph project . It consists of 20 requirements (see Table ) that were manually extracted and processed by human specialists in requirement analysis.…”

“…Cosine similarity is an approach already used in some of our previous publications, and the approach is not presented in detail in this article. Interested readers can refer to our previous publications for a detailed explanation of the approach. Equation , presented below, summarizes the cosine similarity principle.…”

“…The central perspective taken in this article and that differentiates the article from previous work in the field is the consideration that metrics of different forms can form the underlying basis of requirement interaction management. Metrics are developed further using previous work done by the team of researchers who wrote this article . This work should be seen as a fundamental attempt to develop metrics and combinations of metrics based on common NLP methods for capturing different requirements properties and interactions.…”